Category: Geen categorie

Breda (October 25, 2019) – Revisely is one of the biggest online text correction tools with more than 200,000 users. As a teacher, you were able to reduce your workload by outsourcing your correction work to colleagues through Revisely. Next year we will start to make this even easier. With our online platform, we want to help overbooked teachers by matching them with other professionals who can then mark, correct and give feedback on student assignments for them. This results in less workload for the teacher, more qualitative feedback for students and counteracts the major educational problem of our time: the teacher shortage.

Teacher shortagesRecently, the teacher shortage in education has been a lot in the news (in The Netherlands it even made it into the King’s speech to open the Parliamentary year). Because of the shortages, many schools have great difficulty filling vacancies. They are forced to enlarge classes and/or put unqualified teachers in front of the class and are often forced to cancel classes. Due to the high work pressure, fewer writing assignments are set each year because teachers simply do not have the time to correct these essays, papers, dissertations, letters, reports and other texts. This, of course, does not improve the quality of education. At the same time, the workload of secondary school teachers is increasing due to the ageing of the teacher population. Moreover, a quarter of the staff in secondary education suffer from burn-out complaints and are considering leaving education.

Outsource the correction of your students’ textsThis is how it will work: a teacher can easily place students’ texts on Revisely’s platform and mention important points for the evaluation of the assignment. The assignment is then matched to another professional with the most suitable profile to provide good qualitative feedback on the specific assignment. This external reviewer will be notified after which he/she goes through the texts and gives qualitative feedback and a grade per student, using rich comment sets consisting of clear explanations for the student. The teacher looks at the reviewed work and may add comments him/herself and then sends the feedback to the students. The teacher can assess the quality of the work of the external corrector and give a review.

All advantages in a nutshellBusy teachers will have more time to focus on teaching. Revisely takes the most annoying work off the teachers’ hands, giving them more time to prepare for lessons. More time can therefore be spent on the actual reason they entered the field of education – being in front of a class and interacting with the students. At the same time, the employability of teachers is further improved as the scarce highly educated teacher does not have to do the work that another professional can do. Thanks to Revisely, students also receive more qualitative feedback, which further improves the learning process for them. Schools can save costs in two areas: the cost per text that is corrected is significantly lower and recruitment costs to attract the necessary teachers are avoided. Society as a whole benefits from the lower workload for teachers and the qualitative feedback improvement for students, while there are no extra investments in attracting teachers. Professionals who are currently not involved in the labour market can also start participating in education again.

An experienced teacher such as Mart from the ambitious Rodenborch College also believes in the power of outsourcing correction work:

“Many types and forms of text must meet specific criteria. These criteria can easily be standardised using the Revisely tool. In that case, it doesn’t really matter in terms of content which teacher corrects the text. In the case of the central final exams, we find it quite normal that this is checked by two different teachers, so why not the normal texts as well?”

– Mart van Eijk, teacher at the Rodenborch College

About ReviselyWithin Revisely, teachers can provide the submitted texts of students with observations and feedback by means of an extensive database. Revisely stores and archives the assignments and keeps a priority report for the pupil, teacher and school management. These reports make it possible to easily identify and differentiate bottlenecks. Various features can also be used in Revisely, such as checking for plagiarism, handing in teams and peer grading. Outsourcing of text correction with Revisely is our latest project.

EUNIS 2019 was hosted by NTNU in Trondheim. Hundreds of delegates descended on the Norwegian city for a few days of seminars, workshops and socialising. Revisely shared a stand with SciPro, offering visitors a combination that is hard to beat!

We spoke to a good few people at the conference and have already started following up on the interest shown. EUNIS also saw Revisely’s new Nordic team in action.

Altogether, it was an enjoyable conference. Next year, EUNIS will be in Helsinki. But there is no need to wait that long to speak to us – drop us a line to book a demo!

Revisely will take part in the 25th EUNIS annual Congress, the 5th to 7th of June 2019 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

The EUNIS19 is organized to encourage exchange, cooperation and debates among experts, practitioners and managers responsible for information systems in higher education and research institutes/organizations within Europe. This year, the theme is “Campus for the future”, where a range of areas within digitalization and future campus development is covered.

We are very excited to be joining this important meeting place for digitalization of higher education in Europe and to introduce Revisely to more parts of the world!

While teachers may always aim to help students who are falling behind, busy schedules don’t always permit the extra attention and the feedback students need. It is Revisely’s mission to solve this problem. We want to stay up-to-date on all new technological developments including artificial intelligence. Therefore, Revisely became a member of the Nvidia Inception Program!

Revisely has joined the NVIDIA Inception program. This is a virtual accelerator program that is designed to nurture startups revolutionizing industries through advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data sciences. Revisely will benefit from the ongoing support of the program as it continues to develop our product. Every Inception member gets a custom set of benefits, from hardware grants to training with deep learning experts.

Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education?
Increasingly, we start to see the possibilities of AI in education. Some of the roles AI can play in the classroom could be for example as a tool to have a completely automatic grading process, as a chatbot to communicate with students or to let the teacher know when material needs to be retaught. Understandably, there is still some hesitation at the idea of using this technology, as many education professionals fear the day robots will replace teachers. We do not believe teachers can ever be replaced. However, AI will reshape the way teachers teach and students learn and both bring them to new heights!

Last week the Australian Embassy together with the EdTech collective The Dutch School, organised an interactive roundtable discussion about opportunities in the field of educational technology in Australia.

Together with ambassador Mason, his team and 24 other Dutch EdTech start-ups, Revisely joined the table and shared views, experiences and strategies to explore the market opportunities and undertake a potential business scoping mission to Australia! The Australian EdTech sector forecast is to grow rapidly and provides a great example for the Dutch sector.

A big thank you to Australian ambassador Mason and his team for hosting a great meeting. We are very excited about the possibilities of doing business in Australia!

License agreementRevisely, the online tool for teachers to give fast, more and better feedback to texts, started a new partnership with one of the biggest universities of the Netherlands, Utrecht University (UU). Since September 2016, UU used Revisely to correct and provide their students’ essays and papers of feedback. After one year of testing and intensive cooperation, UU and Revisely concluded a license agreement for four years. Teachers at UU can now correct assignments efficiently so students are easily provided with extensive feedback at their work.

New project to improve students’ writing skills
UU and Revisely also started a new collaboration on a new innovation project on students’ writing skills. The aim of the university is to improve the level of writing skills of graduating students from all different fields of study with a better level of writing skills. Together, the UU and Revisely, will look for ways how the online application tool can contribute to this. This project is expected to roll out later this year.

Recently, an article was published about our CEO and founder of Revisely: Jeroen Fransen!

The New Learning Times (NLT) is produced at the EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. The website provides daily coverage of the transformation of learning opportunities in the information age for those shaping the future of education.

Revisely’s goal is to improve the quality of education for everyone. We aim to do this by offering solutions that support teachers at their job, giving students a higher chance to improve themselves and by giving the school board more information on the level of progress. While Revisely is growing rapidly, we do think it is important to maintain and further develop the social character of the company. In order to stay focused on social innovation and to explore further possibilities, Revisely participated at the EU-funded Social Innovation Community Summer School (SUMSIC 2017) in Bologna.

The Summer School was held at the University of Bologna from June 26th to June 30th. Social innovations are new strategies, concepts, organisations or ideas that meet the social needs of different elements which extend and strengthen civil society. During SUMSIC 2017 opportunities were presented for a lively discussion about the role of regions as possible ecosystems for social innovation. A special emphasis was devoted to the importance of history and culture of a region for the development of such an ecosystem, as well as the role of institutions, private and public, to support and facilitate such development.

The school provided presentations of cases and experiences of social innovation in regions in and outside the EU, as well as general lectures and talks. SUMSIC 2017 was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about social innovation ecosystems. Working at multiple challenges during the workshops gained new insight into social innovation possibilities. To be continued!

We released a new version of Revisely today with some big updates. Check your mail for more details.

Added:

Team hand-in: allowing students to hand in documents together as a team. Teacher’s feedback on one text will reflect back on all team members.

Peer grading: students are now able to give feedback on each other’s essays, papers and other texts

Improved:

User interface: the assignment list has been revamped completely to offer a better overview and more functionalities where they’re needed; we added a separate list where you see all students connected to one assignment; this is where you can now monitor and manage hand-ins, plagiarism checking and results.

Translations: completed translations to Dutch and Spanish

Lots of server-side improvements: you will only notice the improved speed